


To Boil Telephone Porridge

by tehtarik



Category: Original Work
Genre: Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, Litfic, M/M, Malaysia, Manglish, Racism, is this litfic?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 19:26:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15803037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tehtarik/pseuds/tehtarik
Summary: To boil telephone porridge. To talk for hours on the phone.





	To Boil Telephone Porridge

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Small Messages (煲電話粥)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10796751) by [tehtarik](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tehtarik/pseuds/tehtarik). 



Daniel always waited for Aizzat at the gate.

He would wedge one foot between the wall and the metal frame and hoist himself up, using the hinge as a rung, his other leg dangling behind him.

“Ah Boy!” Kwai Sim would shout from inside the house. “You fall down and break all your bones then only you know ah!”

Aizzat showed up around five every day. If it rained, then Daniel would wait by the telephone instead, slotting balled-up Sugus wrappers between the coils of the handset cord. The phone would ring, and then Daniel would be on the line with Aizzat for hours.

Often, Kwai Sim had to chase him away from the telephone, scolding, “Still here? Enough already lah! I didn't know boys also can bou din wa juk.”

There was one afternoon when both he and Aizzat got bored of kicking around a ratty shuttlecock in a makeshift game of takraw.

Daniel kicked the shuttle into a pot of orchids. “Let’s go to the longkang catch fish.”

Aizzat was reluctant. “Afterward your mak scold us then how?”

“She won’t know one. Why? Scared ah?”

To prove Aizzat wasn’t scared, they slipped out the gate and went up the road to the big drain at the bottom of a slope. The longkang ran the length of the housing estate before feeding into a much larger monsoon drain further away, and was always semi-clogged with islets of rubbish: plastic bags, cardboard, hunks of polystyrene, and old newspapers. Often, there were monitor lizards or crows rifling through the rubbish. And sometimes there were guppies, swimming in sharp flicks through the brown water.

They descended the slope, lalang scraping the sticky blades of their leaves against their calves, and clambered down the concrete banks of the drain.

“Stinks, man,” said Aizzat.

“Like your ma.”.

“Shut your mouth, okay.”

It was hard to see any fish in the shallow, silty water. Flies thrummed around them. Anything swimming would have made them happy. Tadpoles. Wriggling mosquito larvae.

Then Aizzat stepped on a chunk of rock that wobbled beneath him, and he lost his balance and fell, crashing onto his knee. When he got up, there were pieces of his glass embedded in his knee. One of the splinters glinted in the afternoon sun. Daniel couldn’t take his eyes off the blood.

“Let’s go back man,” said Aizzat. “Here no fish.”

“Wait,” said Daniel.

Aizzat hadn’t seen the flash of orange near his ankle. A guppy, brightly-coloured, iridescent in the muck. Daniel ducked slowly, empty plastic container in hand. With his other hand, he gripped Aizzat’s shoulder hard.

“Woi!”

“Don’t move, don’t move.”

But Aizzat moved. He shifted his leg and the fish darted away just as Daniel swooped, the container splashing dirty water all over both of them. The guppy was gone.

“Eh what’s your problem?” shouted Aizzat, trying to shrug off Daniel’s grip.

Daniel didn’t let go. He was very close to Aizzat, who looked angry and nervous and uncomfortable, maybe because of the close proximity to Daniel, maybe because he’d just been splashed with stinking drain water. Daniel wanted to say, you made me lose the fish, you stupid. But he couldn’t speak. Something was off. He didn’t want to let go of Aizzat. At the same time, his stomach crawled. His heart missed a beat. He didn’t like the feeling that swamped his throat like a mouthful of the cod liver oil Kwai Sim made him swallow each night. It made his mouth reek, filled his breath with shame.

Aizzat shoved Daniel away, and Daniel pushed back.

“Fuck your mother,” said Aizzat. Daniel had taught him this some weeks ago.

“Let’s go,” said Daniel at last, after they’d shoved at each other enough.

Kwai Sim was waiting for them when they got back. She dabbed Savlon onto Aizzat’s knee before dropping him home. Then she grounded Daniel for the next three weeks. Aizzat wasn’t allowed to visit.

That was okay. There was always the telephone, and that served them well over the next month. Bou din wa juk, as Kwai Sim would say.

 

\--------

 

The telephone rings while Kwai Sim is cleaning a colander of bean sprouts, peeling off their ends. Kheng Huat is still at work.

She wipes her hands and turns off the kitchen radio on top of the fridge. She’d been listening to the news: a sudden increase in dengue cases in Selangor, some big corporation raising RM200,000 for cancer research, the cancellation of the Seksualiti Merdeka festival due to public outcry.

The phone doesn’t have a voicemail function. It’s an old telephone: square, turquoise and blocky like a toy. Ah Huat wants to throw it away. In fact, Ah Huat wants to get rid of the whole concept of a landline, and get Kwai Sim to learn how to use a smartphone, like everybody else.

“Hello?” Kwai Sim says.

There’s a rustle at the other end, the plastic-pop of interference. Nobody answers, but the line is still holding.

Her heartbeat leaps to a frenetic pace before she even realises why.

“Daniel? Ah Khim? Is that you?” she says, very carefully. If she doesn’t say his name right, or with enough caution, it might not be him. Just her imagination, tricking the name off her tongue.

“Mi,” says Daniel at last. His voice is rough. It’s faint. Now and then the line is skewered by static. He must be somewhere far away.

Ten years Kwai Sim has been practising all the things she would say to Daniel, if she ever spoke to him again. Ten years of practice conversations in which she is patient and reasonable and Daniel a pliant, agreeable party, are now wiped clean from her mind.

If she doesn’t say something, she may break down. Worse, he may hang up.

“Daniel,” she says again, just to be sure it’s really him, “You eaten already or not?”

Daniel laughs. “Not yet.”

“Where are you?”

He hesitates so long that she starts to think he’ll never tell her. Finally: “Manchester.”

He sounds different. An unfamiliar accent hemming the edges of his speech, a slick grammar cutting his sentences into shape. He speaks in statements. No questions, no inflections.

“I’m cooking nga choy for dinner tonight. Stir fry nga choy with salt fish. Your favourite, remember?”

“Yeah, I haven’t eaten that in awhile.”

He doesn’t say he wants to come home. Not even one of the old jokes of saving some for him.

Kwai Sim steels herself. “So, Ah Khim--,”

“Sorry. I know this is a short call but just wanted to test if – if I can still call – but I need to go.”

Kwai’s Sim’s questions are desperate bullets. “What? How come? At least tell me what’s happening? Why Manchester? What’s your number? Can call you or not? Don’t go yet, Ah Khim – so long never talk to you.”

“I’ll call again,” he says, his voice mirroring her panic.

“You okay or not? You in trouble is it? Your Pa and I can help, you know.”

“Of course I’m okay. Bye, Mi.”

He doesn’t wait for her reply before he hangs up.

 

\------

 

On Koh Tong, Kwai Sim spends all afternoon preparing tong yuen, to be eaten after dinner. Another thing Daniel liked to eat while he was still at home. He could eat about twelve of those glutinous rice balls in one go, sucking at the flour coating, spongy with syrup, black sesame paste sludging down his chin.

While waiting for Ah Huat to come home, Kwai Sim turns on the TV.

The news today: two rows of shops burned down in Kepong, suspected arson. The Federal Court overturning the Court of Appeal to uphold a ban on cross dressing. Haze from the burning forests in Sumatra, the air pollutant index approaching unhealthy levels.

Kheng Huat comes home at seven, his 1990s Iswara sputtering up the driveway. The car door slams, and then the clink of the key turning in the grille.

The first thing he asks when he sees Kwai Sim: “The boy got call today ah?”

“No.”

He sets down his bag. “You know when he’s going to call again?”

“How many times must tell you I don’t know?”

Ah Huat asks these same questions every day, as soon as he gets home from work, ever since she told him Daniel had called.

He pours himself a glass of water and drops in three ice cubes. As he drinks, he starts droning on about all the client meetings that didn’t go well, as well as about his favourite chicken rice stall closing shop.

“Haiyo,” says Kwai Sim when she’s sick of his moaning. “Why you still standing around complaining? Faster get ready for dinner. Afterward the food cold then you complain some more.”

Meekly, he goes upstairs to wash. She used to say this to Daniel too.

“Fai di la, Ah Boy, go wash your hands. You want to eat germs and get stomach ache, is it?”

“Good lah, then don’t need go school tomorrow.” And he would run away before she could swat the side of his head.

There’s too much food for dinner because she has been cooking for three again. Daniel always had a black hole of an appetite. There’s pomfret steamed with sliced ginger. Prawns in sambal petai. ABC soup and chilli kangkung. But it is Koh Tong, after all.

“Sik fan,” says Kwai Sim when both she and Ah Huat are seated.

“So much food,” says Ah Huat. “Cannot finish tonight.”

After dinner, there’s tong yuen with gula melaka. Black sesame. Daniel’s favourite.

Maybe Daniel, wherever he is, will remember that tonight is Koh Tong, that the whole family is supposed to eat tong yuen, that they're supposed to share the same dish despite all the space and time in between. Reunion, however meagre and fragmented over the timezones, but still a reunion of some sort.

Then she starts to doubt: what if he doesn’t remember? What if he does, and doesn't care? Can you even get tong yuen in Manchester, or wherever he is?

Kwai Sim blows her nose into a tissue and wipes and her eyes even though they’re dry.

“Next time don’t make the sambal so hot lah,” says Ah Huat.

It has been more than two months since Daniel called.

 

\--------------------

 

“You’re always cooking,” says Daniel.

“Your father is always eating,” his mother shoots back.

Daniel struggles for the next thing to say. Already, he regrets making this call.

“I cook, too,” he says, “Sometimes.”

“Really ah?” Kwai Sim is shocked. “Like what?”

“Last time I made gai jau. Just like you used to make it. Except I used rum instead of rice wine.”

That was actually nearly three months ago. Lately he hasn’t had the energy to even turn on the stove, much less cook a full dish.

It must sound absurd to his mother. When he left home, he didn’t even know how to boil a pot of rice. All he could make was microwaved Maggi noodles with an egg broken into the MSG-saturated soup.

“You cook for yourself only?” Kwai Sim asks.

“Aizzat eats the things I make. Sometimes. He’s not a bad cook himself.”

There is the longest silence. Daniel starts to count in his head, but he can’t line the numbers up, can’t think in a sequence. Nine. Six. Four. Twelve. Seven. All he knows is, if he gets to ten, if the number ten jumps in his brain like a spark, he’ll hang up.

“Your Pa not back from work yet,” Kwai Sim says, finally. “Why don’t you call him? You still got his handphone number?”

“Maybe next time.”

“Just say hello only mah.”

“Not right now.” Daniel refuses to give in. His fingers develop a restless rhythm, twirling the cord of the handset, drumming on the counter, scraping paint with his thumbnail from the mural on the wall next to him.

He’s in Paris, and the last two nights him and Aizzat have been sleeping in a hostel dorm on Rue de Fourcy, near the Seine.

“So you have been with Aizzat for a long time now,” Kwai Sim says, carefully. Persistence. Her need to iron out the facts.

“That’s right.”

“Since you left is it?”

“Yes.” He changes the subject. “Hey Mi, why don’t you get a smartphone? Then we can talk for free over Skype. Or WhatsApp. Or some other free app. So I don’t have to keep hunting for places that sell international call cards.”

“Don’t want,” Kwai Sim says. “So complicated to use. Some more the screen so tiny, all the words tai mm dou, my eyes can’t see.”

“Think about it,” he says, and then a quick lie to escape this nowhere conversation, “I’m nearly out of minutes. I’ll call you again.”

After he hangs up, the world around him snaps back into motion. People shuffling in and out of the communal area of the hostel. Traffic outside. Everything had seemed frozen while he was on the phone; his attention riveted down the line, trying to decrypt his mother, to read the clues in her voice, to read her.

Aizzat is in the empty dorm, scrolling through his messages on his phone.

“Had to use the landline,” Daniel tells him, sitting at the edge of the bed, rubbing his face into his palms.

“Your mother?” says Aizzat.

“Who else would I call?”

“Just asking.”

Daniel pinches the bridge of his nose. He goes up to Aizzat whose back is turned to him and puts his arms around his waist. Presses his face between Aizzat’s shoulder blades.

“Sorry. Sorry. You’re all that I have.”

No reaction at first. Then Aizzat slides his own hands over Daniel’s wrists and clasps them tight.

“You got problems, man,” Aizzat says.

“Surprised?”

“Hey.” Aizzat turns his head slightly. His profile a crisp sketch, just an inch from Daniel. “Why don’t we go outside, walk by the river?”

“Sure.”

That’s not what Daniel wants, but he doesn’t tell Aizzat that.

He also doesn’t tell Aizzat about the lie over the phone to his mother.

The truth: him and Aizzat hadn’t been together long. Well, yes, they’d started off that way, and then they’d left KL and moved first to Perth, then the big leap to Manchester. Daniel hadn’t wanted to move to the UK; Perth was cold enough during winter, but Aizzat had friends there, and so they moved.

Then Aizzat left, and somehow he’d frosted over, alone in his icy flat, unable to move on. For years he’d stagnated.

Only three months ago, Aizzat had returned, and they reconciled, Daniel promising to change, to do better, to be less of a dick. Aizzat came back, and all of a sudden, he was overwhelmed with a relief that was sharp, so real, that it exhausted him completely.

It was him that suggested to Aizzat on a whim, “Let’s travel around Europe, like everyone talks about doing.”

And so that’s what they’re doing now. Except it doesn’t fix his exhaustion. The residual strain of those long empty years, the terrible fear that he’s going to lose everything yet again.

They’re in Paris and outside this room is the Seine, and Daniel doesn’t want to see it.

 

\---------------

 

The box is heavy in Kwai Sim’s hands. It contains: a Quick Start guide, a plastic tray housing a charger, a pair of earphones, a coil of USB cable. And of course, the phone itself: a plain black Lenovo phone, the screen reflecting the spinning blades of the ceiling fan. Knives in a mirror. A piece of indecipherable tech.

Ah Huat got her the phone yesterday.

“Cheap one lah,” he said as he presented it to her. “First you learn how to use, then only I buy you better one. Got new iPhone coming out in a few months.”

She lifts the phone out of its plastic cradle and balances it flat on her palm. There are no buttons to press, no visible controls. She doesn’t even know how to turn it on. It just sits there in her hand, a cut of black unreactive glass.

“Must charge first,” says Ah Huat when he sees her shaking it side to side, trying to activate it.

He helps her plug the charger into a power outlet, and connects the phone to the charger using the USB cable.

Daniel has called her a few more times since. He refuses to give her his mobile number though, and he still won’t make contact with Ah Huat.

“Where’s Daniel now?” Ah Huat asks.

“Last time he called he was somewhere in Spain. Don’t know where also.”

“He still with that pondan friend is it? That Malay boy?”

Kwai Sim snaps the Quick Start booklet shut and slaps it down on the table. “You mean Aizzat. And you please don’t talk about our son like that.”

Ah Huat picks up today’s issue of The Star and flaps it open. The paper makes a brittle sound. “Last time you also said the same what.”

“You don’t shut your mouth now, then you’ll never talk to your son again.”

She says this so fiercely that it becomes less of a threat and more of an omen. Ah Huat looks uneasy. He doesn’t say anything else.

One of the pages of the newspaper slips from his grasp and rustles its way to the floor. There’s an article about the new science centre in Shah Alam, and another one about a new play, _Asmara Songsang_ opening at the Istana Budaya. Kwai Sim glances at the fallen page and looks away.

 

\--------------------

 

“Your Pa not well today. I’m cooking some fish porridge for him. He got stomachache. Some more got diarrhoea. I tell him so many times don’t go to that kopitiam near his office – so dirty that one. But that man ah, whole life don’t want to listen, what to do, now suffer lor.”

Daniel listens idly to his mother’s complaints. These, he remembers.

“Today he’s so weak, cannot even walk down the stairs. Only time he gets out of bed is to run to toilet. He go toilet lao sai five times already, and not even midday yet.”

“Mi,” says Daniel loudly. “I don’t need to hear all the details.”

“Just making conversation mah, since every time you call got nothing to say.”

He rubs a circle on his temples.

Today he woke up in a hostel in Venice. He’s supposed to be wandering around the piazzas and admiring the architecture or watching the gondolas glide along the canals. Except today he woke up with too much sun in his eyes because it’s just one of those days. He could hardly move from bed.

Aizzat thinks he’s sick. And maybe he is sick, a disease of inertia sitting in his limbs, turning his body to lead. His brain, a thick slug in his head.

“Tomorrow,” he told Aizzat. “The canals and the gondolas and whatever will still be there. I just need to stay in today.”

  
“This whole trip was your idea.” Aizzat looked resigned. “I’m going out. I’ll be back in the evening.”

  
He wanted very much to ask Aizzat to stay in with him. They could just lie in bed the whole day, talking only if they had to. But Aizzat would hate to waste the day like this.

  
“Ah Khim,” says Kwai Sim, and his attention drifts back to her. The receiver is getting warm from his own body heat, and his ear is starting to blush with the pressure against it. “I got a new handphone. A smartphone. Your Pa is going to slowly teach me how to use. Then you don’t have to buy any more call cards.”

  
“Ask Pa to download Skype or WhatsApp onto your phone. We can talk for free.” Then he realises what he’s saying and nearly kicks himself out of frustration.

  
“Okay good, what’s your number?”

He tries to worm away from the topic. “I’ll text it to you later, then you can just add it directly to your contacts.”

“You tell me now. I write it down.”

“That’s the slow way of doing things,” he says, exasperated.

“You think I can learn so fast meh?”

He ends up giving her his number. He has to repeat it to her three times. The line is busy with static today. Sometimes the connection falters, and there are patches of silence in their conversation. You can fall into these silences, perhaps, and not emerge again. It’s so easy to lose rhythm with someone.

There’s a sharp intake of breath coming from her side. Kwai Sim curses. “Sei fo lah! Wait ah, Khim, don’t hang up!”

“Hello?” Daniel says. “Mi?”

No reply. Distantly, there’s clattering. A different, muted life at the end of this tunnel. He holds the line. Folds the corner of his call card. Folds the card in half. He thinks of Aizzat. A stab of longing for him.

“Daniel? Still there ah?”

“What happened?”

“Remember I was boiling porridge? Talk so long until I forgot and the juk all burn. Waste all my effort.”

“I remember,” says Daniel, “that one time you talked on the phone for so long that the biscuits you were toasting in the oven caught fire.”

Kwai Sim laughs. “Eh, your memory so good. Ya, ya, I remember. Bou din wa juk. But this time the juk really burn some more.”

The phrase is vaguely familiar. He doesn’t ask her to explain, but it sounds like something they can laugh about together, so he plays along with that, and his mother echoes his laughter.

 

\-----------------

 

Daniel left home a few weeks before he turned twenty-one.

He was still going to class at the university, and he usually left early in the morning after a cup of Nescafé. He would pick up Aizzat on the way, and they would both stop for breakfast at the nearby mamak before heading to class. He didn’t usually come home until after 8pm.

Which was why Kwai Sim wasn't expecting to see his black Daihatsu parked in the driveway at two o’clock in the afternoon on a weekday. She and Ah Huat had been on a week-long trip to Melaka to visit Ah Huat’s sister, but they’d cut their holiday short and returned early to KL.

Something made them both pause and decide not to call out for Daniel when they entered the house. His backpack stood by the front door. The downstairs was quiet, except for the hissing blades of the ceiling fan.

Kwai Sim went upstairs. The door of Daniel’s room was shut. If he was out, it would be ajar.

Sometimes she thinks the first mistake she made was opening a door that wasn’t meant to be touched by her.

Daniel was in the room. His shirt was on the floor. There were other pieces of clothing on the floor as well. A lacy blouse. A red bra. Things that didn’t make sense. These were the things that first caught Kwai Sim’s eye, maybe because she didn’t want to see the rest of it.

And the rest of it was this: Daniel, on his knees, his face frozen, angled toward her at the door. His open mouth, the red around his lips, his eyelids dark blue like bruises. Sitting at the edge of the bed, right before Daniel, was Aizzat, looking equally stunned, mouth also smeared with lipstick. It smelt like sweat in there, the smell of skin and slick.

“Daniel? Why are you home? How come no class? What are you two doing? Whose are all these clothes?” Kwai Sim shot out questions without thinking about what she was asking, her voice rising in pitch.

Aizzat fumbled for his clothes (not the blouse or the skirt or the bra). She glimpsed the inside of his wrist, the smudge of red against his dark skin. Daniel rubbed his mouth on the back of his own hand.

And then Kheng Huat came to see what was all the fuss. He stood there beside Kwai Sim, and he kept demanding an explanation, what are you two thinking, how long has this been going on, and in our house as well!

Daniel ignored them both. He told a petrified Aizzat, “You go first. I’ll handle this.”

Aizzat gripped Daniel’s wrist, but he pushed him away. Aizzat fled.

“Go out,” Daniel told them, his voice barely above a whisper. “I need to change.”

Kwai Sim and Kheng Huat went out of the room, out of the house, all the way down the road and to the next street, to Aizzat’s house, where they ended up in an argument with Hafiz and Zuraidah, Aizzat’s parents. There was a lot of blame being flung around. A lot of words being bandied about, words like pondan, or bapok, or liwat. Aizzat’s father saying that Daniel was a corruptive influence on Aizzat. Kheng Huat announcing that Aizzat was no longer welcome at their house.

The next few weeks were unpleasant for everyone. Daniel spent them mostly at home, refusing to wake up for class, shut up in his room.

The times when he did go out, neither Kwai Sim nor Ah Huat dared to ask any questions. When he was gone, Kwai Sim peeled through his belongings, his drawers, under his mattress, but she found nothing that satisfied her. Anyway, the answers would have terrified her and Ah Huat.

  
Kwai Sim tried her best to mend things by cooking Daniel’s favourite meals every day. Assam fish. Bak kut teh. Bubur cha cha. He refused to acknowledge her efforts. He ate everything without fuss.

One night, Kheng Huat said over dinner, “This thing with you and your friend, it’s not safe. Especially for him. You know he’s a Muslim so he’s subject to Syariah law, right? JAKIM can come after him any time. They can arrest him. It happened before, you know or not.”

Daniel’s answer was lifeless. “Didn’t know you cared so much about him. Or how come you’re such an expert on Syariah law.”

“I research on Internet,” said Kheng Huat.

Daniel smiled. He looked like he was holding back laughter.

Later that night, Kwai Sim sat alone at the dining table, unable to sleep. She skimmed through the morning’s edition of the Sin Chew Daily. Daniel came downstairs without greeting her. Clattered about the kitchen and emerged with two mugs of Milo. One mug, he set before her.

He looked exhausted. He’d lost weight, despite all the effort she’d put into cooking his favourite meals. Food and family – weren’t they supposed to be the balm to all life’s problems?

“Ah Khim ah, you shouldn’t be up so late.”

He didn’t say anything, only pretended to read the newspaper on the table, his gaze gliding along the columns of text. Nothing remarkable. A nine metre reticulated python swallowed a man in a kampung near Mersing. Flash flooding in Seremban. A university organising a poster challenge encouraging students to help their wayward brothers and sisters correct their unnatural orientations.

“I always – I’ve always liked it here,” said Daniel. “And I actually -- like you both. Even though you’re my parents. That’s why I don’t tell you everything.”

Kwai Sim didn’t understand. “What you trying to say, ha?”

“Nothing.” Daniel got up. “You want some biscuits?”

“No need lah.”

He went and got some anyway. He brought out a tin of Hwa Tai cream crackers, used a teaspoon to dig open the lid, and together they ate those greasy, flaky squares, one after another, crumbs scattering on the table.

Kwai Sim felt hopeful. This felt hopeful. They could talk this through. They could go back to normal. Forget about everything. Start again.

Or so she thought.

The next day, Daniel went back to class. He never came home.

 

 

\-------------------------

 

He calls his mother from Santorini, Greece. Santorini is an unreal place, blue domes and arches and whitewashed buildings scrambling down the slopes into the sea. Too much sea everywhere. They’d splurged on accommodation this time. Instead of the usual backpacker hostel, they’d booked themselves into a proper hotel. Aizzat is in bed back in the room.

They had spent the day walking around the caldera and then at night, had a few too many glasses of retsina. Aizzat, who didn’t usually drink, was more than a little pissed. Daniel had to support him all the way back to their room. He set Aizzat down on the bed, tugged off his shoes and tossed them aside. Aizzat slurred something in reply.

Daniel couldn’t sleep, so instead he’s here in the hotel lobby, making a long overdue call. Ever since he gave his mother his mobile number, she has tried more than a few times to call. And each time he sees her landline number ringing through, he sends it to voicemail.

“Mi,” says Daniel. He’s a little tipsy himself.

“Where are you? Now what time ah?”

“I’m in Greece. Always wanted to be in Greece. Not really, I don’t like travelling, but if I did like it, I would really like Greece. I’m in Greece, Mi. In Santorini.”  
Kwai Sim is irritated. “Eh you mabuk or what? Cannot understand. Mou tau mou mei.”

“What?”

“No head no tail.”

“Sorry, sorry,” he says. “I’ll call another time.”

“Daniel,” says Kwai Sim. “I’m always happy when you call.”

“Okay.”

“Wait, I want to say something more.”

“Just one more thing? I really need to take a piss.”

“Why you must talk like that, ha?” Kwai Sim grumbles.

“Bye.”

“Okay, you better go.”

“I’ll call next time.”

“Daniel,” his mother blurts out suddenly, urgently. “Are you still angry?”

He freezes. “What are you talking about?”

“Everything that happened before you left. That’s why you left, right?”

“No,” he says, shortly.

“Is it my fault you left?”

“Why are you bringing this up?”

Kwai Sim is ruthless in her pursuit of the topic. “If it’s your Ma’s fault here, then I’m sorry.”

It doesn’t feel right, his mother apologising to him. And he can tell that the words are abnormal angles slicing their way out of her mouth. That this isn’t right for her either. A misshapen sentiment.

“It’s over, okay? I need to go for real, Mi.”

“Okay.” She sounds disappointed. “You call again? Can or not?”

“Yes.”

He hangs up a little roughly. He goes outside, glances up. An aeroplane blips its way across the sky. He tracks it for awhile, imagines its crawl through the dark stratosphere, through radar fields, then loses sight of it between the ragged clouds. The breeze is salt-edged against his cheek.

That day his parents found him and Aizzat in his room. Nothing to talk about. Except maybe the feeling of being gutted. Robbed of something that was rightfully his. There was that awful intimate moment that broke him open before his parents. The shame of wearing his own exposed flesh, turned inside out. And that terrible sense of loss, one that even now, at the thought of his parents, makes him recoil from them, from their line of sight.

Sometimes he thinks about that day and all he wants is to shrink into his skin, be eaten away into the hole in his gut, self-cannibalised. Or to blink out of conscious thought, like an aeroplane in the night sky. Lost in the clouds.

His father had been predictable. Said predictable things. At least he matched one of the dozens of scenarios that often played in Daniel’s head, prior to the day.

But his mother. All she’d done was stand by his father, refusing to move, pretending to be hurt. And then trying to comfort him in the most puerile of ways. She’d cooked all his favourite dishes, brought him cups of herbal tea at all hours of the day. The only way she knew how to deal with things. He’d eaten and drunk everything to please her, to try and placate them both, even if he couldn’t quite taste anything. He stayed home as much as he could in the weeks following that awful discovery. The three of them in that house, the air between them stale with resentment, with superficial affections, with that absurd hope that things could reset, go back to before. All that hostility and despair. All those irrelevant meals.

Yes, Daniel thinks, she _should_ apologise to me.

The hatred that surfaces is a violent spike, directed toward his mother. And then as always, it turns back inward.

The stupidest thought strikes him: at least she hadn’t seen him when he was wearing that red bra and skirt. It’s such a stupid thought that he laughs out loud. Her face would have been a sight. Her disgust would have been priceless. Wounding, but priceless.

Back in the room, Daniel slides in beside Aizzat. Aizzat talks in his sleep. Sprays his sleep-breath in Daniel’s face.

The sea must have followed him into the room, into these sheets, because all he can taste is salt.

 

  
\------------------------

 

  
Somewhere down the street, there’s a party going on.

“Must be a wedding,” says Kheng Huat. He’s sitting on a rattan chair on the porch, smoking a pack of Dunhill Lights.

A convoy of cars, striped with flowers and sashes, passes, horns beeping in staccato. There’s a flash of white in one of the cars, perhaps the bride.

“These hau sang jai lui,” says Ah Huat, exhaling smoke, “all like to show off one.”

Kwai Sim carries on sweeping the dirt from the porch.

Today, a wedding. Tomorrow, something else.

There’s always some celebration or other going on these days: weddings, engagements, birthdays, reunions. And then, of course, there are the usual festivals. New Year. Koh Tong. Ching Ming.

But ever since Daniel left, she and Ah Huat have stopped observing most of them. All the days they used to celebrate become more difficult to live through with Daniel’s absence. Each day passes quietly, hopelessly.

Yesterday, she fought with Ah Huat.

She said, “I stood by you all those years ago, remember or not? But I shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have let you say all those things to him. I should have been more supportive to Ah Khim. Then maybe he wouldn’t have gone.”

Ah Huat flared up. “Now you want to blame me for everything is it? We were trying to protect our son what, even after everything he did.”

“It’s both our faults.”

“Not mine.” But some of the fight has leached out of him. “Anyway we were good to him. Other parents would have kicked their children out already. We gave him chance what. He’s the one who left, okay.”

“Listen to yourself! No wonder Ah Khim still refuse to talk to you.”

Later in the afternoon, Kwai Sim listens to the news as usual as she chops spring onions.

A famous singer from Canada is coming to KL for a concert. A schoolboy murdered by a group of classmates who suspected him of being gay. A Clean up the Klang River campaign.

The kitchen still smells of carbon from that day she’d burnt the porridge while on the phone with Daniel. That was a few weeks ago. She remembers standing at the sink, scraping the crust of blackened starch off the bottom of the pot.

Kwai Sim turns off the radio. The news is over. Next to the radio, her hand brushes against something cool. It’s her new Lenovo phone that she has been patiently trying to work out for weeks.

She’s tried calling Daniel’s mobile from the landline, but he never answers.

But maybe using this new phone will work. Just maybe. She has to keep trying. It’s her fault after all, this whole mess. She picks up the phone, drags her finger across the screen, selects an app. The number in her head leaps off her fingertips.

There’s a crinkling of interference, and then, connection. A voice on the other end. In between her and the voice is a line, the frailest thread straining across the world, and yet it holds. It feels like a very small celebration.

 

\-----------------------------

 

“Hello?” says Daniel, rubbing his sleep-drugged eyelids. He doesn’t recognise the caller’s number.

“Khim ah! I finally figured out how to use this new phone! Not bad for your old Ma, leh?”

Aizzat sits up beside him, kisses his bare shoulder. “You okay?”

In response, Daniel drags his hand across the back of Aizzat’s head. He’s fine.

“It’s 4am here, Mi.”.

But he’s not angry at all. If anything, he’s glad to be awake. He almost has to laugh at how she’s finally managed to get through to him. One day, her persistence will wear them both down to rags and bones. Maybe then, they might just be able to see eye to eye.

“Just wanted to ask,” says Kwai Sim, “When are you coming home?”


End file.
